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The debut of the Radeon RX Vega graphics cards as well as the launch of the Ryzen Threadripper and getting more information on the Ryzen "performance marginality problem" occupied most of August.

As usual, here is a look at our most popular content for the past month on Phoronix. For August 2017 on Phoronix there were 274 original news articles and 31 featured articles/reviews. This is roughly in line with my aim of around 10 original pieces on Phoronix per day, every day, 365 days per year.

If you appreciate all of the Linux benchmarking, hardware reviews, Linux/open-source news, and more that you can find on Phoronix every day, consider showing your support by joining Phoronix Premium and/or making a PayPal tip but at the very least please do not be viewing this site with an ad-blocker. Premium allows you ad-free access to the site, multi-page articles on a single page, and other features while still supporting our operations with ads otherwise being the only way this site can sustain itself over 13+ years.

With that said, the most popular featured articles this month included:

Radeon RX Vega On Linux: High-Performance GPUs & Open-Source No Longer An OxymoronThe Radeon RX Vega is shipping today and for Linux gamers this is a serious AMD offering for being able to handle modern Linux games. But it goes beyond that in the RX Vega launch easily being the most successful launch ever for a GPU backed by open-source drivers on launch day. I've been spending the past several days testing the Radeon RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64. The RX Vega 56 is a very competent graphics card for $399 USD while those wanting to reach peak performance for Linux gaming on a open-source system can find the RX Vega 64 for $499 USD. The open-source support for Vega isn't without some initial setup hurdles and some growing pains along the way, but it's looking very good for launch-day and the best DRM+Mesa support we have ever seen at-launch for the premiere of a new discrete GPU architecture.

AMD Threadripper 1950X Linux BenchmarksLast week I was able to finally get my hands on a Threadripper 1950X system thanks to AMD for being able to deliver some Linux tests from this high-end desktop platform. The Threadripper 1950X as a reminder is a 16-core processor with 32 threads via SMT, 3.4GHz base frequency, 4.0GHz boost frequency, quad-channel DDR4 support, and support for 64 PCI-E lanes. Threadripper sits between the Ryzen 7 desktop processors and the AMD EPYC server/workstation processors, which are still soon to be tested at Phoronix. The Ryzen Threadripper 1950X will set you back $999 USD, but compared to the Core i9 7900X at the same price, has six more cores / 12 threads and a slightly higher base clock frequency of 3.4GHz vs. 3.3GHz but a lower boost frequency of 4.0GHz vs. 4.3GHz.

Continuing To Stress RyzenIn direct continuation of yesterday's article about easily causing segmentation faults on AMD Zen CPUs, I have carried out another battery of tests for 24 hours and have more information to report today on the ability to trivially cause segmentation faults and in some cases system lock-ups with Ryzen CPUs.

Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Radeon Gaming Performance With Linux 4.13 + Mesa 17.2In the past few days I have posted benchmarks showing how AMD's latest open-source Radeon Linux driver code is faster than their hybrid/proprietary driver for OpenGL and perhaps most excitingly is finally how AMD Radeon GPUs are beginning to really compete with NVIDIA GPUs on Linux and in some cases performing better against the GeForce competition than they do under Windows. This comes after years of work on their open-source driver stack and especially a lot of work done over the past year not only by AMD but also Valve and other open-source contributors to Mesa, their RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, their AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end continues to be refined for compute and graphics, and the AMDGPU kernel driver. So here are the latest Windows vs. Linux gaming benchmarks on the Radeon side to see where things stand now with this latest code.

New Ryzen Is Running Solid Under Linux, No Compiler Segmentation Fault IssueAs a quick update to the AMD Linux "Performance Marginality Problem" affecting some early Ryzen processors under heavy load, today I received a new Ryzen 7 processor and indeed it's been running strong now for the past few hours under demanding load and has yet to hit the compiler segumentation fault bug.

AMD Ryzen 3 1200 & Ryzen 3 1300X Linux PerformanceAt the end of July AMD began shipping the Ryzen 3 entry-level Zen processors. While it may not be as exciting as a 16-thread Ryzen 7 or Threadripper, the Ryzen 3 1200 and Ryzen 3 1300X offer surprising value with being quad-core parts priced at just above $100 USD. With Linux users especially craving multi-core systems if running Arch or other distributions where you are frequently compiling your own packages, the Ryzen 3 CPUs can make for a low-cost but practical Linux system. Here are my initial benchmarks of these first two Ryzen 3 processors.

16-Way NVIDIA GeForce vs. AMD Radeon Comparison - August 2017Last week were the benchmark results showing how the open-source Radeon Linux driver is becoming increasingly competitive with NVIDIA's driver and is very competitive OpenGL-wise with the Radeon Software Windows driver. Here are some more NVIDIA and Radeon benchmarks today under Linux with each vendor's latest drivers using sixteen different graphics cards.

Athlon II X3 vs. Ryzen 3: How AMD's Performance Has Evolved & Performance-Per-WattNoticing I had an AMD Athlon II X3 425 system still racked up and hadn't been powered on in a long time, I decided to decomission it, but not before running some final benchmarks on that system. Having the recent AMD Ryzen 3 1200 / 1300X CPUs I decided it would make for an interesting comparison how the old Athlon II X3 compares to AMD's low-end CPU of today, the Ryzen 3 processors based on Zen. Here are those benchmarks that also include performance-per-Watt and overall AC system power consumption numbers.

More Benchmarks Showing How Gallium3D With RX Vega Smacks AMDGPU-PRO's OpenGL Proprietary DriverOf the many interesting findings from this morning's AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 / 64 Linux review was how the open-source AMDGPU+RadeonSI driver stack with OpenGL actually outperforms AMDGPU-PRO driver, the hybrid Radeon Linux driver relying upon AMD's closed-source OpenGL driver that's also shared with the Windows OpenGL driver. Here are more benchmarks of the RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64 showing the margins by which AMDGPU+RadeonSI can outperform AMDGPU-PRO.

Some Early AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X Linux BenchmarksYesterday along with the completely Linux-trouble-free Ryzen 7 (it indeed went overnight without any issues coming up via the kill-ryzen script), I finally got my hands on the AMD Threadripper. In particular, the Ryzen Threadripper 1950X that features sixteen physical cores yielding 32 threads via SMT, 3.4GHz base frequency, 4.0GHz boost clock frequency, and quad-channel DDR4 support. This Threadripper 1950X is a beast but will set you back $999 USD and has a 180 Watt TDP. I'll have my much more thorough AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X Linux review next week including many more benchmarks, performance-per-dollar, and system power use / performance-per-Watt metrics, but here are some very early results for those anxious to see this HEDT PC on Linux.

Facebook Looking To Add Zstd Support To The Linux Kernel, BtrfsZstd (also known as Zstandard) is a lossless data compression developed by Facebook that has been open-source since last year. This BSD-licensed compression algorithm aims to offer compression similar to zip/gzip but with faster speeds both for compression and decompression. Facebook developers are now looking at adding this support to the Linux kernel.

NOVA: The Newest Linux File-System, Designed For Persistent MemoryIt's been an interesting week for Linux storage with Red Hat deprecating Btrfs and Stratis being their next-gen Linux storage bet. Independent of that is now the announcement of NOVA, a new Linux file-system coming out of university research into file-systems for persistent memory.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 10,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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